Archive for October, 2012

It’s simple: if you read my blog, that makes you my friend. And friends don’t let friends put themselves in harm’s way. I keep running into this situation: a friend gloomily tells me about how he or she had come to grievous harm when their hard disk crashed, or when a virus infected their machine, or when their account got hacked. So I ask: you made a backup, right?! But no, they hadn’t. They behaved irresponsibly, and they paid the price. Then I advise them how to take preventive measures so they’ll do better next time, but I beat myself.. Read more

A serendipitous request Much of the cooler stuff that I do happens serendipitously, when someone hears of me and comes with a request for something different. In this case it was a friend of a friend who runs workshops for corporate employees approaching retirement. She wanted a lecture about the Internet, to be given to retirees of a Lo-Tech company. At first this seemed a problem: I consult about social media adoption by Gen Y in the enterprise, but that’s the very opposite of Lo-Tech Baby Boomers in their mid-sixties! But as I thought about it I realized that a.. Read more

We need food to survive. Old food can do us harm. Therefore, we have a range of defense mechanisms – from our noses and taste buds to mandatory “best use before” dates on food packages – to detect and eliminate obsolete food. We need information to survive in today’s workplace. Old information can do us harm. Where are the defense mechanisms to detect and eliminate obsolete knowledge? Help! We’re drowning in old information! Everybody complains about drowning in information overload, be it incoming email overload, social media addiction, too many RSS feeds, and so on. We also complain about useless.. Read more

A familiar knee-jerk reaction We’ve all been there. The economy goes into the down side of one of its never-ending spasmodic cycles and the word comes down: Freeze all business travel! The urge to batten the hatches when times get rough is understandable and necessary; that’s how responsibly-managed companies survive the hard times. It’s just that a sweeping ban on business travel makes no sense at all in the context of survival, because such travel has an important role in securing the future of the very company you’re trying to help. It never ceases to amaze me how the significance.. Read more

Being the curator of the Alan Turing Year exhibition at the Jerusalem Science Museum, I was invited to sit on a panel dedicated to Turing’s legacy at the ICON Science Fiction, Imagination and The Future festival in Tel Aviv. My talk there was well received, and touches on some interesting truths, so I decided to share its content here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have! Incidentally, Alan Turing’s life and work will be the basis of a new lecture I will be adding to my public speaking offerings. The subject is a fascinating one on so.. Read more

I decided to write a series of articles that analyze the negative effects of Information Overload in an enterprise setting (though many of the points noted apply to individual knowledge workers, such as small business owners, as well). The first of these articles analyzes an effect that is at once widely appreciated and yet often misunderstood: the loss of time due to email overload and interruptions, which has been quantified at a day or more of lost time per week. I’ve been looking at this for years, though my original work revolved around email overload and interruptions, and today a.. Read more